Saturday, June 30, 2012

That was a tweet from TV provocateur Bill Maher about a week or so ago.

Sheldon Adelson owns casinos. You could even say he is attracted to casinos, which is why he owns so many of them. But he does not attract casinos to himself in the way "chick magnet" Matthew McConaughey attracts women, for instance. That is because Sheldon Adelson is not a "casino magnet" but rather a "casino magnate."

The primary pronunciation of magnate in most guides calls for a long a in the second syllable, but enough people of dubious breeding are pronouncing it exactly like magnet that that has become an established alternative utterance. This has obviously led to some confusion between the words, as evidenced by the faulty tweet of said TV provocateur.

I'll never be able to trust the Internet again.

Addendum: For an excerpt of the funniest writing you will ever read on magnets, see this.